...that a foreign government is going to sit on a treasure trove of information about US citizens and not use it? That's right up there with believing democracy is going to break out in the middle east. You don't think the Indian and Pakistani governments aren't data mining our data and systems for competitive intelligence? Wake up already. We're outsourcing data on millions of Americans to potentially hostile countries and yet no one sees that development in the same light as keeping all our war ships in one harbor in Hawaii.
These days they can start while kids are in grade school and track their whole lives. Grades, attendance, medical issues, legal problems, everything. I'm really grateful to be old enough that some of my electronic history happened before the days of endless inter-connected databases being hosted in Asscrapistan.
...moving your key production applications to web-based alternatives, standardizing on FireFox and Thunderbird for web browsing and email, and getting people comfortable with OpenOffice by handing out disks for everyone in the company to take home and play with then today you could laugh at Vista upgrade costs because you could use any client OS you wanted.
Some companies have actually been doing that and now it's paying off.
I believe his calculations are going to prove pretty close to on target. If they're over it won't be by much. I use the following rule of thumb guide for hardware/software upgrades/refresh:
If the estimate comes from MSFT, double it.
If the estimate comes from one of the Big 5, raise it by 45-50%
If the estimate comes from a MSFT Solution Provider, add 40%
If you're doing a MSFT upgrade yourself with all internal labor, add 35%.
Rigging elections has been the standard for a very long time, decades AT LEAST.
I don't believe that. It certainly has happened, many times in isolated places, but it's not a standard...at least it wasn't. And certainly never on this scale with this level of organization. For the most part I think the majority of elections in our history were, by and large, fairly honest. And I base on that on actual experience working inside the voting process. The majority of poll workers take their responsibility very seriously. Sometimes I'm surprised how careful they are, even when they disagree politically.
I don't care who did it before or when. It's a death penalty offense (or should be) in Chicago, NY, Atlanta or where ever it takes place. Find those responsible and stand them up against a wall and broadcast the execution on prime time television. That's what the integrity of elections should be worth to our country.
Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.
That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.
So while you're managing your application portfolio your user base will be writing applications with Access and Excel like they used to. All this does is push development off IT and on to the users. So instead of having all your apps with a common front end (web browser) and a common back end, like SQL Server, you'll be back to the linked spreadsheet house of cards and an application portfolio of who knows how many different vendors.
Total insanity. But Gartner packages in terms managers like to hear. The higher ups like managing their portfolio, like thinking they're savvy investors. They want to think managing IT is easy. It's just like managing a stock portfolio. No hard decisions, no struggle to understand anything, the Easy Button for IT.
Notice they're not trying to sell the IT department on this bullshit. Because they'd shred them like a shrimp at Bennihana's. That's another unfortunate trend I've seen. Bypassing the IT department and going right for the higher ups with pre-packed PR inspired, advertiser-controlled-media conventional wisdom.
Disovery is closed and time for IBM's SJ Smackdown. I'm betting they granted most, if not all their PSJ's. Time to stick a fork in this pathetic case.
Let's not forget Microsoft's involvement in this swarmy tale. They got caught in bed with SCO, sort of like being caught with a hooker when the media shows up. I'm guessing no one at SCO is going to volunteer for federal ass-pounding prison if there's a way to drag some MSFT execs into the case with them. It'll be interesting to see if that's what IBM's had in mind all along when the SCO case unwinds. Whether they just drop and move on, or if they start following the breadcrumbs back to Redmond.
The SCO case is a loser, but get some dirt on MSFT in the process...that might pay off a bit better.
On one hand everyone we switch over to OSS is one less spambot on the internet. Just that much less background noise in an already noisy ecosystem.
On the other hand, why do I care? If users aren't smart enough to ask for OSS or spend 15 minutes learning about it, why is that my problem to solve? I can sit back and laugh at the Windows threats making the rounds, make appropriately sympathetic noises when my friends claim their computer is getting more sluggish every time they boot up. I make a lot of money fixing MSFT crapware, so I'm not doing myself any favors converting the Great Unwashed.
The only thing I might change is requiring PC manufacturers to offer a competitive choice of operating systems on new PC's. They don't have to support them, just offer the choice with the price difference plainly visible. Or, at a minimum, offer the same machine with no operating system minus their OEM Windows price. It's quite likely most consumers would choose Windows anyway and that's fine. Right now there is no choice and that's wrong.
This is one of those ideas that sounds good in the board room and eventually reaches daylight because no one has the nads to stand up and say it's a really dumb idea that will ultimately be counter-productive. I run into the management group-think attitude all the time. And the dummer it is, the more likely there's some hard-headed, gung-ho upper-level manager determined to ram it through. As if being tough, determined and dogmatic magically transforms it into a better idea.
Almost as dumb as charging content providers for faster delivery pipes. Only that stupid idea had a lot of high paid lobbyists behind it and government-funded studies that echo how great for consumers it would be. Perhaps the telcos are desperate to ram it through now just in case they lose their majority this fall.
I don't know if anyone else sees this, but it seems lately I've run into more managers absolutely convinced of their own "rightness", even when common sense and good practice would dictate another course. There has always been some of that in corporate structures, but in the last five years it seems to have gotten much, much worse. Winning seems to be more important than being accurate.
What WiMP11 represents is one of the biggest thefts of your rights that I can think of.
And for millions of little stupid people will get dinged in their wallet and walk away feeling vaguely violated. But they'll have a passive-aggressive little snit and that will be the end of it because it's not enough money to make a major issue out of it. So MSFT will be able to winnow the masses for a few pennies that will add up to billions for them and the little stupid people won't get anything even if they sued because the click-through EULA probably limits damages to $1.00 even if they win.
MSFT isn't satisfied on having the Windows tax applied to new computers, they're trying to apply it to your data.
I see more MSFT users across the board taking an old box and installing Linux to surf and email or dual booting. Windows is only really dangerous when you surf with it regularly. For online gaming, updates and other tasks where you're not going to be visiting a lot of strange web sites or getting email it's really not bad.
Keep it off of a connected environment and it's great. Hook it to the internet and it's a never ending security freak show.
Why is the government funding a poll on an issue with lobbying constiuents on both sides, seemingly in favor of big business donors? Is this really an appropriate use of our tax dollars? Reminds me of the taxpayer monies spent to back the No Child Left Behind act. Who lost their job for misappropriating government funds in that scandal? Ummmm, no one.
Where's the outrage from the hypocrites on the right about wasteful government spending? I don't think Republicans stand for anything except their tee time these days.
a speculative, conspiratorial nature that doesn't even pretend to promote an unbiased or nonpartisan viewpoint,
But they backed it up with statistical analysis, analysis of the results reported and referenced all their sources. You're calling it biased because you disagree with the conclusion. But what if the conclusion is accurate? Then what are you going to say? The right wing has two defenses: One is to discredit the messenger, the other is try and deny the truth by dismissing it as speculation. But when statistical analysis supports the speculation you want to mod it as flamebait?
If Slashdot is going to be linking to Robert Kennedy, Jr's writings, it better also link to those of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Bill O'Reilly.
I don't care who presents it. If the facts are there it paints a very ominous picture for our country and it makes your duty plain. The question isn't who's presenting it, the question is what you're going to do if it's true?
Because one or the other party did it in the distant past does not make it okay. Technology gave the current ruling party the ability to subvert our election process in a broad and coordinated fashion not available historically.
The bottom line is a lot of good people fought and died to uphold the ideal of one person, one vote and take pride that we run honest elections. The current administration tramples on the Constitution and stacks government agencies with unqualified partisans. They've looted our national treasury and gotten three thousand of our people killed in an ideological war in Iraq. Not only should they be impeached, but if evidence of rigging elections come to light it should undo all that Bush has done in office, including his Supreme Court appointments.
I think Bush lost 2000 and 2004 and that represents a greater threat to our country than terrorism. If the right wing wasn't so shamelessly hypocritical they'd be rioting in the streets for Bush's impeachment. The fact they're lending tacit support to this fraud only demonstrates their lack of character.
I agree with some of the previous comments that many users are running MSFT Office because they're familiar with the products and, right now, they have to be running Windows to use those products (okay, WINE users aside). Where I see the blurring between desktop and internet apps having the most impact is at the low end of the PC market. A $125.00 laptop...or whatever the $100.00 laptop is up to now...would stand to benefit greatly from the availability of online applications.
It may not make a big dent in the US market for some time, but the combination of low cost hardware and online applications in emerging markets would be more immediate and significant. And it does at least hint at the ability to raise the productivity potential of thin clients and extend the life of low end PC's. It may be revolutionary here and there without changing much here. What an interesting possibility.
Should be really interesting to see how MSFT positions Windows for online applications. If you have to be running Windows to run Office Live, it'll be the worst of both worlds.
Blame ease-of-use culture; blame video games; blame stupid parents; but blaming the lack of access to programming languages is ridiculous to say the least.
Sadly quite true. The good news is for those of us with will and the patience to dig into the details there's a whole world of cool things we can do that the Great Unwashed will never get. I have a friend who's an EE. Not one of the really out there EE's, she designs simple circuits. It's amazing what she comes up with. Just simple little gadgets. Programming is much the same. With a fairly simple programming language you can come up with some simple but very handy little widget programs.
It doesn't bother me that much of the rest of the world relies on other people to package their functionality for them. Just like it doesn't bother me that most people let government package their water and electricity. If you want to depend on the grid for your power, that's fine. But give me my solar panels, wind turbines and Python any day.
What Harvard really concluded was there was a better chance of getting an endowment and new Comp Sci building from MSFT than the open source community.
Notwithstanding the large amounts of virii and security issues that must be dodged, Windows XP has been stable and rock solid for a number of years.
I have one token XP box on my network and it does stay working for long periods of time. The reason it stays working is that I don't connect it to the internet unless I'm downloading patches, and then it's NAT'd, firewalled, monitored and just as quickly disconnected. So, yeah, if you let Windows run apart from the internet, it's a great operating system.
I don't think it's entirely fair to separate the security issues out and claim Windows is a stable system. In the absense of the security freak show it's relatively stable, but that incremental improvement in function from a company the size of MSFT, with the resources at their disposal, is, in my opinion, a weak effort at best. Especially considering how much you're paying for Windows and the anal rapage EULA you have to accept. I'm not sure, taken as a whole, the issue of stability is much of a mitigating factor.
If that's the best jusitication Windows users can come up with, that's pretty lame. Even if Vista was the most stable OS ever fielded in the history of computing, I'd still be asking myself why I'm paying for something MSFT should have been doing all along.
Five years after 9/11, you'd think all of the nation's first responders would be on a state-of-the-art wireless network that would enable police, fire and other emergency personnel to talk to each other in case of a disaster.
I almost choked reading that. I'm a volunteer fireman and know first hand what's out there, at least in rural areas. Communication is exclusively radio out where we are and you have to hope someone knows the freq for the other department or the wing if you're waiting for air lift. We don't have enough working radios for everyone in the department, our pagers don't work half the time, we have to buy our own replacement batteries and our turnout gear would have been classified unusable by most departments 10 years ago. I pulled an air mask off the truck the other day and the air hose fell off. We have a squad that leaks...something, we haven't figured out if it's brake fluid or transmission fluid. The windshield wipers will only work when the wig-wags are on and the windshield is so cracked it looks like a New Jersey road map. You can't roll the windows down, even on a hot day, cause there's only a 50-50 chance they'll go back up. We get grant money, which is supposed to replace our old gear, until the city took the funds so they could build a new community center.
State of the art communications...hahahahahaha! I'd settle for a squad that didn't feel like a death trap, some turnout gear made in the last ten years, a decent air pack and a working radio. Big city departments are far better equiped than we are but those resources would be overwhelmed in a big crisis. There's not enough decon gear and no one out away from city departments gets training on how to use it anyway. If anything, we're even more poorly prepared for a disaster than before 9/11 and definitely more poorly prepared than when Katrina struck. We're not only not making progress, in most places we're taking giant steps backwards.
But while we are struggling with Viet Nam era equipment, the richest city in the area gets themselves a brand new terrorist response vehicle. Picture an armored SUV. So we get dick and richest city in the area, the most unlikely place on the planet for a terrorist attack, gets a shiny new armored car that they'll never use. That doesn't even touch trying to figure out the chain of command in a regional disaster. FEMA has been hobbled, DHS wants to be in charge but never drills with the local departments so we all know how it's supposed to work in an emergency. If anything we're LESS prepared for a disaster nationally than ever before. And that failure is a failure of leadership.
State of the art communications....BWAHAHAHAHAHA! My sides hurt from laughing so hard.
I wonder what would happen if a manufacturer created a video card and just let the community write open source software and drivers for it? Save the company the expense of writing the drivers and let the community develop a large potential market for them.
It would seem to have the added advantage of forcing the others to support Linux, but I'm betting that open source drivers would be more widely received, even if the proprietary drivers were better. Just seems that would be a good way to sell more video cards.
How are you going to define it? Violent to one person may not appear violent to someone else. What's the difference between violent and merely kinky? So now the police in England can look at the pictures on your hard drive and make a subjective determination about whether they represent violent images or not. How jolly is that?
Over here we don't need stupid laws like that. Gonzales simply declares it legal and Bush goes ahead and does it without a warrant. Our way saves all that getting the public stirred up about government intrusion into people's private lives.
Slashdot Mirror
...that a foreign government is going to sit on a treasure trove of information about US citizens and not use it? That's right up there with believing democracy is going to break out in the middle east. You don't think the Indian and Pakistani governments aren't data mining our data and systems for competitive intelligence? Wake up already. We're outsourcing data on millions of Americans to potentially hostile countries and yet no one sees that development in the same light as keeping all our war ships in one harbor in Hawaii.
These days they can start while kids are in grade school and track their whole lives. Grades, attendance, medical issues, legal problems, everything. I'm really grateful to be old enough that some of my electronic history happened before the days of endless inter-connected databases being hosted in Asscrapistan.
...moving your key production applications to web-based alternatives, standardizing on FireFox and Thunderbird for web browsing and email, and getting people comfortable with OpenOffice by handing out disks for everyone in the company to take home and play with then today you could laugh at Vista upgrade costs because you could use any client OS you wanted.
Some companies have actually been doing that and now it's paying off.
I believe his calculations are going to prove pretty close to on target. If they're over it won't be by much. I use the following rule of thumb guide for hardware/software upgrades/refresh:
Rigging elections has been the standard for a very long time, decades AT LEAST.
I don't believe that. It certainly has happened, many times in isolated places, but it's not a standard...at least it wasn't. And certainly never on this scale with this level of organization. For the most part I think the majority of elections in our history were, by and large, fairly honest. And I base on that on actual experience working inside the voting process. The majority of poll workers take their responsibility very seriously. Sometimes I'm surprised how careful they are, even when they disagree politically.
I don't care who did it before or when. It's a death penalty offense (or should be) in Chicago, NY, Atlanta or where ever it takes place. Find those responsible and stand them up against a wall and broadcast the execution on prime time television. That's what the integrity of elections should be worth to our country.
Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.
That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.
The incident raises a number of interesting questions and concerns regarding just where our rights end.
Where Bush says they end.
So while you're managing your application portfolio your user base will be writing applications with Access and Excel like they used to. All this does is push development off IT and on to the users. So instead of having all your apps with a common front end (web browser) and a common back end, like SQL Server, you'll be back to the linked spreadsheet house of cards and an application portfolio of who knows how many different vendors.
Total insanity. But Gartner packages in terms managers like to hear. The higher ups like managing their portfolio, like thinking they're savvy investors. They want to think managing IT is easy. It's just like managing a stock portfolio. No hard decisions, no struggle to understand anything, the Easy Button for IT.
Notice they're not trying to sell the IT department on this bullshit. Because they'd shred them like a shrimp at Bennihana's. That's another unfortunate trend I've seen. Bypassing the IT department and going right for the higher ups with pre-packed PR inspired, advertiser-controlled-media conventional wisdom.
Disovery is closed and time for IBM's SJ Smackdown. I'm betting they granted most, if not all their PSJ's. Time to stick a fork in this pathetic case.
Let's not forget Microsoft's involvement in this swarmy tale. They got caught in bed with SCO, sort of like being caught with a hooker when the media shows up. I'm guessing no one at SCO is going to volunteer for federal ass-pounding prison if there's a way to drag some MSFT execs into the case with them. It'll be interesting to see if that's what IBM's had in mind all along when the SCO case unwinds. Whether they just drop and move on, or if they start following the breadcrumbs back to Redmond.
The SCO case is a loser, but get some dirt on MSFT in the process...that might pay off a bit better.
On one hand everyone we switch over to OSS is one less spambot on the internet. Just that much less background noise in an already noisy ecosystem.
On the other hand, why do I care? If users aren't smart enough to ask for OSS or spend 15 minutes learning about it, why is that my problem to solve? I can sit back and laugh at the Windows threats making the rounds, make appropriately sympathetic noises when my friends claim their computer is getting more sluggish every time they boot up. I make a lot of money fixing MSFT crapware, so I'm not doing myself any favors converting the Great Unwashed.
The only thing I might change is requiring PC manufacturers to offer a competitive choice of operating systems on new PC's. They don't have to support them, just offer the choice with the price difference plainly visible. Or, at a minimum, offer the same machine with no operating system minus their OEM Windows price. It's quite likely most consumers would choose Windows anyway and that's fine. Right now there is no choice and that's wrong.
This is one of those ideas that sounds good in the board room and eventually reaches daylight because no one has the nads to stand up and say it's a really dumb idea that will ultimately be counter-productive. I run into the management group-think attitude all the time. And the dummer it is, the more likely there's some hard-headed, gung-ho upper-level manager determined to ram it through. As if being tough, determined and dogmatic magically transforms it into a better idea.
Almost as dumb as charging content providers for faster delivery pipes. Only that stupid idea had a lot of high paid lobbyists behind it and government-funded studies that echo how great for consumers it would be. Perhaps the telcos are desperate to ram it through now just in case they lose their majority this fall.
I don't know if anyone else sees this, but it seems lately I've run into more managers absolutely convinced of their own "rightness", even when common sense and good practice would dictate another course. There has always been some of that in corporate structures, but in the last five years it seems to have gotten much, much worse. Winning seems to be more important than being accurate.
What WiMP11 represents is one of the biggest thefts of your rights that I can think of.
And for millions of little stupid people will get dinged in their wallet and walk away feeling vaguely violated. But they'll have a passive-aggressive little snit and that will be the end of it because it's not enough money to make a major issue out of it. So MSFT will be able to winnow the masses for a few pennies that will add up to billions for them and the little stupid people won't get anything even if they sued because the click-through EULA probably limits damages to $1.00 even if they win.
MSFT isn't satisfied on having the Windows tax applied to new computers, they're trying to apply it to your data.
Nice world we've built for our kids, isn't it?
I see more MSFT users across the board taking an old box and installing Linux to surf and email or dual booting. Windows is only really dangerous when you surf with it regularly. For online gaming, updates and other tasks where you're not going to be visiting a lot of strange web sites or getting email it's really not bad.
Keep it off of a connected environment and it's great. Hook it to the internet and it's a never ending security freak show.
Why is the government funding a poll on an issue with lobbying constiuents on both sides, seemingly in favor of big business donors? Is this really an appropriate use of our tax dollars? Reminds me of the taxpayer monies spent to back the No Child Left Behind act. Who lost their job for misappropriating government funds in that scandal? Ummmm, no one.
Where's the outrage from the hypocrites on the right about wasteful government spending? I don't think Republicans stand for anything except their tee time these days.
a speculative, conspiratorial nature that doesn't even pretend to promote an unbiased or nonpartisan viewpoint,
But they backed it up with statistical analysis, analysis of the results reported and referenced all their sources. You're calling it biased because you disagree with the conclusion. But what if the conclusion is accurate? Then what are you going to say? The right wing has two defenses: One is to discredit the messenger, the other is try and deny the truth by dismissing it as speculation. But when statistical analysis supports the speculation you want to mod it as flamebait?
If Slashdot is going to be linking to Robert Kennedy, Jr's writings, it better also link to those of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Bill O'Reilly.
I don't care who presents it. If the facts are there it paints a very ominous picture for our country and it makes your duty plain. The question isn't who's presenting it, the question is what you're going to do if it's true?
Because one or the other party did it in the distant past does not make it okay. Technology gave the current ruling party the ability to subvert our election process in a broad and coordinated fashion not available historically.
The bottom line is a lot of good people fought and died to uphold the ideal of one person, one vote and take pride that we run honest elections. The current administration tramples on the Constitution and stacks government agencies with unqualified partisans. They've looted our national treasury and gotten three thousand of our people killed in an ideological war in Iraq. Not only should they be impeached, but if evidence of rigging elections come to light it should undo all that Bush has done in office, including his Supreme Court appointments.
I think Bush lost 2000 and 2004 and that represents a greater threat to our country than terrorism. If the right wing wasn't so shamelessly hypocritical they'd be rioting in the streets for Bush's impeachment. The fact they're lending tacit support to this fraud only demonstrates their lack of character.
I agree with some of the previous comments that many users are running MSFT Office because they're familiar with the products and, right now, they have to be running Windows to use those products (okay, WINE users aside). Where I see the blurring between desktop and internet apps having the most impact is at the low end of the PC market. A $125.00 laptop...or whatever the $100.00 laptop is up to now...would stand to benefit greatly from the availability of online applications.
It may not make a big dent in the US market for some time, but the combination of low cost hardware and online applications in emerging markets would be more immediate and significant. And it does at least hint at the ability to raise the productivity potential of thin clients and extend the life of low end PC's. It may be revolutionary here and there without changing much here. What an interesting possibility.
Should be really interesting to see how MSFT positions Windows for online applications. If you have to be running Windows to run Office Live, it'll be the worst of both worlds.
Blame ease-of-use culture; blame video games; blame stupid parents; but blaming the lack of access to programming languages is ridiculous to say the least.
Sadly quite true. The good news is for those of us with will and the patience to dig into the details there's a whole world of cool things we can do that the Great Unwashed will never get. I have a friend who's an EE. Not one of the really out there EE's, she designs simple circuits. It's amazing what she comes up with. Just simple little gadgets. Programming is much the same. With a fairly simple programming language you can come up with some simple but very handy little widget programs.
It doesn't bother me that much of the rest of the world relies on other people to package their functionality for them. Just like it doesn't bother me that most people let government package their water and electricity. If you want to depend on the grid for your power, that's fine. But give me my solar panels, wind turbines and Python any day.
Ha-ha! [/nelson]
What Harvard really concluded was there was a better chance of getting an endowment and new Comp Sci building from MSFT than the open source community.
Notwithstanding the large amounts of virii and security issues that must be dodged, Windows XP has been stable and rock solid for a number of years.
I have one token XP box on my network and it does stay working for long periods of time. The reason it stays working is that I don't connect it to the internet unless I'm downloading patches, and then it's NAT'd, firewalled, monitored and just as quickly disconnected. So, yeah, if you let Windows run apart from the internet, it's a great operating system.
I don't think it's entirely fair to separate the security issues out and claim Windows is a stable system. In the absense of the security freak show it's relatively stable, but that incremental improvement in function from a company the size of MSFT, with the resources at their disposal, is, in my opinion, a weak effort at best. Especially considering how much you're paying for Windows and the anal rapage EULA you have to accept. I'm not sure, taken as a whole, the issue of stability is much of a mitigating factor.
If that's the best jusitication Windows users can come up with, that's pretty lame. Even if Vista was the most stable OS ever fielded in the history of computing, I'd still be asking myself why I'm paying for something MSFT should have been doing all along.
Five years after 9/11, you'd think all of the nation's first responders would be on a state-of-the-art wireless network that would enable police, fire and other emergency personnel to talk to each other in case of a disaster.
I almost choked reading that. I'm a volunteer fireman and know first hand what's out there, at least in rural areas. Communication is exclusively radio out where we are and you have to hope someone knows the freq for the other department or the wing if you're waiting for air lift. We don't have enough working radios for everyone in the department, our pagers don't work half the time, we have to buy our own replacement batteries and our turnout gear would have been classified unusable by most departments 10 years ago. I pulled an air mask off the truck the other day and the air hose fell off. We have a squad that leaks...something, we haven't figured out if it's brake fluid or transmission fluid. The windshield wipers will only work when the wig-wags are on and the windshield is so cracked it looks like a New Jersey road map. You can't roll the windows down, even on a hot day, cause there's only a 50-50 chance they'll go back up. We get grant money, which is supposed to replace our old gear, until the city took the funds so they could build a new community center.
State of the art communications...hahahahahaha! I'd settle for a squad that didn't feel like a death trap, some turnout gear made in the last ten years, a decent air pack and a working radio. Big city departments are far better equiped than we are but those resources would be overwhelmed in a big crisis. There's not enough decon gear and no one out away from city departments gets training on how to use it anyway. If anything, we're even more poorly prepared for a disaster than before 9/11 and definitely more poorly prepared than when Katrina struck. We're not only not making progress, in most places we're taking giant steps backwards.
But while we are struggling with Viet Nam era equipment, the richest city in the area gets themselves a brand new terrorist response vehicle. Picture an armored SUV. So we get dick and richest city in the area, the most unlikely place on the planet for a terrorist attack, gets a shiny new armored car that they'll never use. That doesn't even touch trying to figure out the chain of command in a regional disaster. FEMA has been hobbled, DHS wants to be in charge but never drills with the local departments so we all know how it's supposed to work in an emergency. If anything we're LESS prepared for a disaster nationally than ever before. And that failure is a failure of leadership.
State of the art communications....BWAHAHAHAHAHA! My sides hurt from laughing so hard.
The potential for abuse of this law is so insanely bizarre it amazes anyone growing up in America would even suggest it.
Sadly, things have changed a lot in the America I grew up in. It's really not the same place.
The lack of self-control exhibited by this administration and its departments over the last six years is unbelievable.
What do you expect from a group who gets their political philosophy from a neurotic shrew, a pervert with anger management issues and a drug addict?
I wonder what would happen if a manufacturer created a video card and just let the community write open source software and drivers for it? Save the company the expense of writing the drivers and let the community develop a large potential market for them.
It would seem to have the added advantage of forcing the others to support Linux, but I'm betting that open source drivers would be more widely received, even if the proprietary drivers were better. Just seems that would be a good way to sell more video cards.
Morons cannot be stopped.
But they can cheat their way into elected office...
How are you going to define it? Violent to one person may not appear violent to someone else. What's the difference between violent and merely kinky? So now the police in England can look at the pictures on your hard drive and make a subjective determination about whether they represent violent images or not. How jolly is that?
Over here we don't need stupid laws like that. Gonzales simply declares it legal and Bush goes ahead and does it without a warrant. Our way saves all that getting the public stirred up about government intrusion into people's private lives.
Silly Brits. ;)